John H. Walton - The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest: Covenant, Retribution, and the Fate of the Canaanites

This book began, as all academic books should, as a conversation. My theologian son (J. Harvey) and I (John) were discussing the problem that people have today with the conquest of Canaan. Is God some kind of moral monster that he would commit or condone genocide? This has indeed become a major thorn in the flesh for many Christians... and not only because the skeptics of the world have positioned it as the major indictment against the Bible, the God of the Bible, and Christians who take the Bible seriously. It has also become a catalyst for Christians to begin to doubt the Bible, doubt their God, and doubt their faith. As I listened to my sons thoughts, I realized that he was formulating solutions that I had not encountered before as he brought new perspectives into the issue. He was building on the foundational work that I have done on the nature of law in the ancient world and in the Bible, and on the covenant, as well as using hermeneutical methods that I have taught. But then he was following them through to their logical conclusions to craft an overall understanding of what is going on in the conquest. I found it refreshing and paradigm shifting. It reshaped the conversation for me, as I hope it will for readers.

I suggested he write a paper about it. So he began. After writing nearly nonstop for several days, he had passed twenty thousand words and was not near finished. We realized that this was going to be too long for a journal article and began thinking about a book. At first we were concerned that it might not be long enough for a book, but as the writing process continued, it became clear that having enough for a book would be no problem. It was only after I talked to Dan Reid at IVP about whether he was interested in such a book (and gratefully he was) that it occurred to us all that it would be best as another Lost World book. By the time we were done, we had to pay attention to economy of words so that it would not become too long. It is a complicated topic, and as a result readers who have read other books in the series will find this a more difficult read. Nevertheless, we have tried to honor our commitment to accessibility. Several technical sections seemed apropos, but we decided to make them available on the InterVarsity Press website. The logic should flow around those so that readers who dont want to get entangled or waylaid in the technical details do not have to. Yet, at the same time, that information will be available to those who desire to get it all.

I never intended for Lost World to become a series. In fact, after each one, I state emphatically to friends, family, and students that this will be the last Lost World book! But in our Bible reading, all of us continually encounter portions that we find difficult to penetrate and understand. We need whatever help we can get to position ourselves in the ancient Israelite audience and hear the text as they heard it.

The foundational principles of the book are ones that I have developed over the course of my career, but the specific ideas, logic, and flow of the argument, as well as much of the writing, are the work of my son. My role has been that of consultant for Hebrew and for the ancient Near East, and editor and conversation partner as the ideas developed. This book represents in the main my sons ideas, but I dont say that to distance myself from them. Where I was not initially on board with one piece or another, we would hash it out until we came to agreement. The ideas in the book have been shaped along the way by our conversations, and I have provided the Hebrew details and pointed him to resources from the ancient Near East to make the case.

The stock in trade of the Lost World series is that it uses information from a close reading of the Hebrew text (whether the broad scope of literature and theology or the focused studies of lexical semantics) and combines that with perspectives and information from the ancient cultural context of the Old Testament. This process produces interpretations that help us to transcend the shackles of our modern worldview and traditional readings to recapture the text as it would have been understood by the original author and audience. Our hope is that through that process a world, and indeed a text, that has been lost to us can be found.

Supplemental material for this book can be found at ivpress.com/the-lost-world-of-the-israelite-conquest. Three appendixes available there are The Holiness Spectrum and Its Flaws, Syntactico-Semantic Analysis of Qd, and Joshua 10:12-15 and Mesopotamian Celestial Omen Texts.